A water management system (e.g., wastewater or storm water) is generally used to accomplish the transfer or transport of sewage from some residences and business in a community to a water-treatment plant that cleans the sewage before it is discharged to a source-water reservoir. As a general matter, construction of a sewer system involves the interconnection of some number of segments such as conduits (e.g., pipes), connectors, and the like, which cooperate with and take advantage of the natural effect of gravity to enable the desired sewage transfer to take place.
In the design, construction, and maintenance of a water management system, one important engineering metric or consideration is the determination of how much (i.e., the maximum amount) fluid the system (and/or a given segment of the system) is handling as well as its overall capacity (i.e., the amount that may pass through the system without giving rise to trouble conditions such as overflow, backup, and the like). This metric is often expressed as a “flow rate,” which is the volume of waste water that passes through a given part of a waste water pipe per unit time (e.g., ft3/sec or m3/sec).